During my 20 years at Pixar, one of the things besides the great stories and great animation were the great tools for animation. Menv, now called Presto is the proprietary software that is used at Pixar and it has some powerful tools. One of the most being the spline editor. Now being on the outside I harken back to the days of using that software but have found a set of tools that feels a lot like some of the tools we had at Pixar. They are called AnimBot created by Alan Camilo. Alan is a feature animator and programmer. He found the same issue with the tools he was working with, so he created tools, then the more advanced AnimBot. I had the opportunity to sit down (via video conference) and talk to him about his new set of tools that comes out January 7th! I think the entire animation community should give him thanks because the existing tools that Maya has to offer have not really changed for animation in a long time. This is true especially for studios that don’t have programmers working on custom tool sets for Maya like Disney and Sony. Alan is making tools that not only work, but are intuitive and the list will keep going. I hope to help him get the word out about his tools that fit so nicely inside of Maya. I know as an animator, I can’t wait to get on the box and Animate!. DOWNLOAD them here: